


The Kitten Invasion

by idyll



Series: Critter!Verse [1]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Earth, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-26
Updated: 2006-12-26
Packaged: 2017-10-07 10:34:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/64296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idyll/pseuds/idyll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wherein Rodney and Ronon bring home kittens, Teyla mediates, and John feels persecuted. OT4 Earth-set AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Kitten Invasion

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to inlovewithnight and blueswan9, who encouraged me to post this bit of crack.

John comes home one day to find Rodney and Ronon in the kitchen bottle-feeding seven mangy kittens whose eyes are barely open.

"No, absolutely not," John says immediately, because the important thing here is to reinforce his stance on the topic of cats, which includes kittens. John's a dog person and there was a two week debate (fight) between him and Rodney over getting a pet. Teyla ended up mediating it and the result was that neither John nor Rodney got their way.

He pointedly ignores the soft, open look on Rodney's face, and the fierce, protective one on Ronon's. "Why are they even in the house?" he asks plaintively.

"Someone dropped them out of a car onto a pile of garbage," Ronon says. "Right in front of me."

And, okay, John's getting the feeling that he might be seriously screwed here, because Ronon gathers up three of the kittens on his arm and holds them against his chest, one large hand splaying over them when they shiver. Meanwhile, Rodney places the kitten he was feeding in a basket--one of the many that Teyla's collected since they moved in. Inside there are t-shirts lining the bottom and sides, a large old-fashioned clock ticking in the corner, and three other kittens curled up and sleeping.

"Was he supposed to leave them there to be picked up by civil servants, tossed in the back of a large dump truck, and _crushed to death_?" Rodney snaps at John, facing off and crossing his arms against his chest.

Yeah, John decides when Ronon narrows his eyes, he's totally screwed.

*

After five hours of going back and forth about the kittens, Teyla drags them all into the living room for another mediation session. John's demand that the kittens be taken to a shelter isn't met because Rodney brings out _pie charts_ and _video clips_ and _newspaper articles_ about the horrors of kill-shelters and the lack of room at every single no-kill shelter in the Bay area that takes cats. Ronon just sits on the floor, kittens crawling _all over him_, one of them _swinging_ from his dreads by its _claws_, and leaves the talking to Rodney except to say, "I like it when they purr."

The final agreement that's reached calls for the kittens to remain in Rodney's office, and no other part of the house, until they're old enough to be adopted out, a period of time not to exceed twelve weeks, and John still isn't allowed to get a dog.

*

The problem is that, after a while, the kittens become a lot more mobile and sneaky ("They're not sneaky, John, they're curious!" Rodney says with a roll of his eyes. Ronon just curls his lips and says, "They don't like being locked up. Do you?" and John blames Rodney for Ronon's newfound ability to send John on a one-way, all expenses paid guilt-trip to Guiltonia).

John wakes up one night when one of the kittens kamikazes off of the drape of material hanging from the canopy of their big bed and lands on his face, every single one of its claws out, and takes a knee to the balls when his screaming and flailing startles Teyla, who always comes up swinging, or kicking as the case may be.

His Laz E Boy leather recliner--with built in massager--gets shredded to the point that the guts for the massage controls are on the outside. This happens despite the fact that he stands guard over it, a squirt bottle of water poised and ready to fire, for two days after he catches one of the kittens scratching it.

They somehow get into John's room (which is a place for all his stuff and has never actually been used for sleeping) one day. When he hears the crash and tears into the room, seven balls of fur streak past him while he stands there staring at the destruction in their path. His Johnny Cash poster's been pulled from the wall and clawed to pieces. Several of his model planes are in pieces on the floor, having been knocked from the dresser. They've even clawed the wallpaper away from the walls.

*

The next mediation session doesn't go even a little bit in John's favor.

"Declawing?" Rodney screeches, looking horrified and offended and disgusted down to the center of his bitter, bitter soul. "Do you even know how _inhumane_\--"

"What's declawing?" Ronon asks.

Rodney has the fastest damn mouth in two galaxies and before John can even take a breath to calmly explain the very common procedure, Rodney is already halfway through an emotional and morally damning explanation of his own that has both Ronon and Teyla glaring at John and gathering the kittens protectively to their respective bosoms. In truth, John feels like an utter shit himself after hearing what Rodney has to say, but he'll never admit it.

In the end, Rodney buys what seems to be an entire gross of scratching posts and pads, and John _still_ isn't allowed even just one dog.

"Is anyone even trying to keep them in Rodney's office any more?" John asks miserably at dinner that night. Under the table, two kittens are attacking his left ankle while another free-climbs up his right leg.

Rodney and Teyla have the good grace to look guilty when they say, "Of course we are," but Ronon just smirks and lifts his hand to offer a piece of chicken to the orange kitten who pretty much lives on the back of his neck under his dreads. Its little head pokes out long enough to take the chicken into its mouth before disappearing again.

*

A week later John opens his eyes while he's sucking off Ronon because he loves the way Ronon looks when John's working him like this. Instead of Ronon's blissed out face, though, he comes eye-to-eye with one of the kittens, which is sitting on Ronon's stomach and staring at the proceedings with its head tilted at a disturbingly unnatural angle. John flails in surprise, chokes on Ronon's cock, and the kitten hisses at him, one tiny paw filled with razor-sharp claws swiping across his forehead.

John scrambles off the bed, one hand pressing against the bloody scratches on his face. "This is insane. How can I be the only one who sees that?"

"Calm down," Rodney says. He and Teyla are tangled together on the other side of the bed and they're laughing at John.

The kitten pads up Ronon's chest, lies down and arches into the hand that Ronon strokes down its back. It's staring at John acrimoniously, and he grabs one of the sheets from the bed and wraps it around his waist.

"Find them homes, Rodney," John snaps before he stalks out of the room, the sheet trailing behind him.

*

The ad Rodney puts in several local papers doesn't result in even a single phone call, and after two days John slaps a paper down in front of him, the ad circled in red marker.

"What's wrong with this picture?" John snaps.

Rodney twitches and clears his throat. "I have no idea what--"

"Look closely."

"Um, well, it would appear that they inverted the last two digits of our phone number," Rodney says after a moment, and John can _smell_ the lie on him.

"They're all like this, Rodney," John grinds out from behind clenched teeth. "Somehow I doubt that three different papers made the same damn mistake!"

Rodney looks stubbornly unrepentant and John finds himself sighing and slumping, tired and beat down by the battle that's now on month two. "Right," he says lowly. "Okay."

*

John spends two days on the boat, blissfully free of fur, claws, and sharp needle-like teeth, and not-so-blissfully free of the three other people he's used to spending time and sleeping with.

When he gets home he realizes that leaving the others alone with the kittens for forty-eight hours was maybe a bad idea. All seven of them have names and collars now, and even the illusion that they're not going to be here forever has been shattered: there are litterboxes, random bowls of food and water, dozens of cat toys, and several multi-level carpeted cat trees strewn throughout the house.

Rodney stares at him with bleary, dark-circled eyes and asks, "Are you done sulking, yet?" in a miserable but irritated tone.

"No," John says pleasantly, wincing when a kitten fast on the trail of a small jingling ball runs through the kitchen. "I'm really not."

*

John sleeps in his room that night for that first time ever and ignores Rodney's angry screaming, Teyla's irritated rationality, and Ronon's disgruntled rumbling. John isn't used to sleeping alone anymore and the full sized bed in his room feels huge and empty, and so he's awake to hear Rodney shout, "Oh, for god's sake!" and stomp out of the house at three in the morning.

He's curious but not enough to leave his room and ask the others. A few hours later he's dozing restlessly and the sun's just coming up. The door to his room slams open and before John can even get his eyes open Rodney says, "Here, okay? Take them. Just...take them and stop being unhappy and sleeping in places other than our bed."

The sight of Rodney holding two squirming puppies by the scruff of their necks, as far in front of him as his reach will allow, is one that John never thought he'd see.

He doesn't know where Rodney found them in the middle of the night but he's not going to ask because they're chocolate labs and that means that _someone_ in this house was actually listening to him at some point.

"Oh," John breathes and Rodney's face untwists from a distasteful scowl into something a little fonder.

"You are one-hundred percent responsible for them," he says roughly. "I will not be feeding, walking, cavorting with, or cleaning up after these, these, _animals_, and if either of them does _anything_ to the kittens, you will regret your very existence."

John scrambles out of bed and snatches the puppies from Rodney's hands, holding their squirming, wriggling bodies against his chest. "Cool," he says and rubs his face against their soft, soft fur.

*

.End


End file.
